THE BIBLE & THE CREED: Recent Episodes
Brian Doak
What is the Bible, and what do Christians believe? These lectures were delivered as plenary sessions on Mondays by Professor Brian Doak, followed by Friday panel sessions featuring various guests, all over the course of an academic semester at George Fox University (near Portland, Oregon, USA). Each lecture tackles a small part of the Apostles’ Creed, in sequence, while also tracking with the story of Israel’s God in the Christian Bible. All the way from “I believe…” and the book of Genesis to “the life everlasting” and Revelation!
Jamie Johnson (PhD, BIOLA), Jamie Noling-Auth (DMin, Gordon Conwell), and Rusty St. Cyr (MA, George Fox University), all campus pastors at George Fox University, join the panel to talk about the Christian life. What is the meaning of our lives here on earth—are we basically just waiting until eternity? And what is eternity supposed to be like? Sitting on harps playing clouds? Burning eternally in a fire? Do Christians believe that we gain “salvation” at a particular point in time, and then lose (and gain back) that salvation repeatedly?
How should we read the Bible, when all is said and done? How does the Christian story end? What is the fate of the believer? Is Jesus returning to earth, and if so, when? What is heaven like…and hell?
Professor Todd Curtis (MA, University of Colorado) and Dr. Celeste Jones (PsyD, George Fox University) join us for a round-table discussion on the body and forgiveness. Is it strange, from the perspective of psychology and biology, to think of God redeeming our literal bodies? What about science—does anything in our material world give us hope for expecting anything remotely like a resurrection?
Jesus died and rose from the dead—what does this mean? How do the Gospels communicate the meaning of Jesus’s suffering, and the larger purpose of Jesus? What does the book of Romans have to say about “faith”?
Jamie Noling-Auth (DMin, Gordon Conwell), Leah Payne (PhD, Vanderbilt), and Joe Thouvenel (MA, George Fox University) join the panel to talk about the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? How does the Holy Spirit function within the trinity? And what about “spiritual gifts” such as speaking in tongues—is this a real thing?
What happens after the Gospels? How do Jesus’s earliest followers form a community and carry on with the message? What is the “Holy Spirit,” and how is the Holy Spirit a part of the Trinity? Who was Paul, and what were his letters (“epistles”)? What role does the theme of “descent” play in the Christian conception of Jesus?
Guest host Anderson Campbell (DMin, George Fox University), Paul Anderson (PhD, Glasgow), Nijay Gupta (PhD, Durham), and Steve Sherwood (DMin, George Fox University) join the panel to talk about Jesus in the Gospels. What is the “Kingdom of God”? Why wasn’t Jesus more open about his identity as divine? What is the core message of Jesus?
We finally arrive at the New Testament, the distinctly Christian part of the Bible! The main character here is Jesus, the center of Christian biblical interpretation. Where does Jesus come from, and what was his political and social context? Jesus announces the coming of a “kingdom”—but what kind of kingdom is it, and what kind of “king” is he, if he gets killed in a shameful and horrible way?
Lisa Cleath (PhD, UCLA) and Melissa Ramos (PhD, UCLA) join this week’s panel, held outside the classroom in Brian’s office with no audience, for a broad conversation on the Old Testament story. What should we make of Israel’s story, now that it has ended in the Old Testament? Or did it really end? Does God’s covenant continue on—and how? Is the Old Testament God “mean”? Join us for these questions and more!
We finally arrive, roughly, at the end of Israel’s story in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament—at least the major thread of Israel’s story as it occurs in Genesis – 2 Kings. The Babylonians destroy Jerusalem and the temple, culminating in the events of 586 BCE (narrated in the first part of 2 Kings ch. 25). How does Israel come to this? What happened to the covenant? The promise to the ancestors? What about the land? What about the promise to David? And where could this story possibly go next?
Caitlin Corning (PhD, Leeds), Brooks Lampe (PhD, Catholic University of America), and Sue O’Donnell (PhD, University of Minnesota) join us to talk about lament and wisdom. In the Christian tradition, Jesus suffered badly, was crucified and humiliated, and actually died. That’s not the end of the story, but it happened—what does Scripture have to say about the experience of life’s darkest moments, and life’s end? How should it be morned, and how we turn to lament and wisdom at the right time?
This week we tackle the darkest aspects of Israel’s experienced, embodied in the words of the Creed, “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” How did Israel deal with disorientation, death, and suffering? In this lecture we discuss how the books of Psalms and Lamentations engage with the category of “Lament” and how Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes offer a vision of “Wisdom” to Israel in response to suffering.
Abigail Favale (PhD, St. Andrews), Isaac Choi (PhD, Philosophy), and Steve Sherwood (DMin, George Fox University) join the panel to field a variety of questions about repentance, prophets, men and women and gender and God, the virgin Mary, and how Christians might think about the assurance or shakiness of salvation.
We continue with the prophets this week, focusing on Jeremiah and Ezekiel, while narrating Israel’s history down to the eventual destruction of Israel (the northern part of the country) around 720 BC and Judah (the southern part of the country, around Jerusalem) in 586 BC. What role does Jeremiah play in trying to warn the people of their fate in his so-called Temple Sermon, in Jeremiah ch. 7? And how does Ezekiel embody the pain of exile and sin and death through his words and actions and other imagery in his book? Do either of these prophets offer any hope for the future for Israel?
Rebecca Hernandez (PhD, Oregon State University), Gary Tandy (PhD, University of Tulsa), and Anderson Campbell (DMin, George Fox University) join the panel to talk about their favorite prophetic books and how to think about prophets today. Are “prophets” still speaking today, in the biblical style? How do we know who speaks for God? What kinds of issues might God care about today?
What is a prophet? And how did Israel’s prophetic tradition function? In this lecture, we take a look back at some earlier prophets we’ve met but didn’t discuss (Abraham, Moses, Miriam, Deborah) and talk about the characteristics of the prophet, including the dual ways prophets (a) confront kings and speak truth to power as well as (b) encourage the nation and support kings during times of national distress. We take a closer look at the context of Isaiah ch. 7, which narrates a famous scene that becomes very important for Christianity and the identity of Jesus in the New Testament.
Javier Garcia (PhD, Cambridge) and Tim Tsohantaridis (PhD, University of Athens) join the panel to field a barrage of questions about God’s gender, the meaning of the Trinity, seeing Jesus in the Old Testament, violence in Scriptures, and the challenge of seeing the same God across the whole of the Bible (as opposed to seeing the Old Testament God as mean and violent, against the New Testament God, who is loving and forgiving and kind).
The Creed now takes us to the figure of Jesus, and to the concept of Jesus as God’s “only son.” How can God have a son? The narrative in Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and 1–2 Samuel culminates in the possession of Israel as land and the spectacular promise to David as king in 2 Samuel ch. 7. This lecture takes a tour of this material, and asks about the meaning of terms like “king,” “son,” “land,” and “messiah” (Hebrew machiach) all by way of laying the groundwork for how Jesus would come to interact with these terms.
Davida Brown (PhD, Stanford), Todd Curtis (MS, University of Colorado Boulder), and Mark Terry (MFA, Azusa Pacific) sit down to talk about creation, science, and art. Are science and religion locked in a death match, for which there can be only one winner? Or are they compatible in some way? Is it crazy for scientists to believe the Bible’s creation account—and in what way? Are there analogies in the world of art for thinking about the here-and-now-ness of creation as a biblical motif?
When we call God a “Creator,” what exactly does that mean? Is creation imagery in the Bible about the past, or the present, or even the future? Is Genesis 1 the Bible’s only creation story? (Answer: no!) What about other creation stories from the Bible's ancient context? What about science? The professor provides “Seven Theses On Thinking About Creation in the Bible”…
Laura Hartley (PhD, Michigan State), Melanie Mock (PhD, Oklahoma State), and Anderson Campbell (DMin, George Fox University) join the panel to talk about the question of God’s gender and the Law. Is there any danger in calling God by male or female pronouns? Does the Bible have imagery that portrays God in female or mother terms? What should Christians today do with the laws in the Torah, so many of which seem strange, brutal, and unnecessary for the life of faith today?
What does it mean for God to be “Almighty”? What does it mean for God to be a “Father”—are we supposed to think that God is a man? Is God so above and beyond our concepts that we cannot even speak about God in any accurate way whatsoever? What happens when Israel leaves Egypt and heads out into the wilderness? What is “the Law” in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy?
Cameron Marvin (pastor of Theophilus Church in Portland), Javier Garcia (PhD, Cambridge), and Mary Peterson (PhD, California School of Professional Psychology) join the panel to reflect on the meaning of God. Do people have a natural proclivity to believe in God? What about atheism? Do humans need God? Would nuclear war destroy our beliefs about human goodness and achievement?
A lecture on the concept of “God,” particularly in the biblical vision of the Book of Exodus. How is God revealed? What should a God be like? Should God be angry, omniscient, friendly? Does God have emotions? How is Israel’s God different from or similar to Greek philosophical conceptions of God? What is “salvation” in the biblical vision? How does the concept of “covenant” function in the Bible?
Joseph Clair (PhD, Princeton), Nijay Gupta (PhD, Durham), and Caitlin Corning (PhD, Leeds) join the panel to discuss difficult questions such as: What is the difference between “belief” and “knowledge”? Is believing in God the same as believing in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus? Are Christians “certain” of their beliefs?
A reminder that although we have no plenary lecture this week to set up our readings and panel, the panel, which is (4) in this series, will resume the discussion of the words “I believe,” the book of Genesis, and some additional issues raised by this week’s reading. This “lecture” is imply a 90 second clip of me explaining all of this.
Isaac Choi (PhD, Notre Dame), Ross McCullough (PhD, Yale), and Kristina Kays (PsyD, George Fox University) join the panel to talk about the image of God in Genesis, sin, redemption, and the theological problem of election in the Bible.
A lecture on the first two words of the Apostles Creed, "I believe...," as filtered through the book of Genesis. Delivered at George Fox University on 14 January 2019.